Kasz216 on 10 October 2013
| allenmaher said: The claims of ahistoricity (the lack of historical evidence) of the new testament’s christ are fairly well established. I doubt there are many secular historians who think that there is any contemporary historical evidence of christ. |
Contemporary evidence. No. Though there isn't a lot of contemporary evidence for a ton of people widely accepted to have existed howver.
Which is generally why most secular historians do agree Jesus existed.
People who make the "Jesus never existed" arguement more or less don't understand how archaelogy and history works from a critical perspective, espeically from that early a time period.
To quote atheist historian Michael Grant.
"This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth.... But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because some pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms.... To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serous scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."
